Perlman believes great music
comes from being team player

Itzhak Perlman may be the most famous classical musician on the planet. But even when the violinist appears as a “soloist,” his first priority is to be part of a team.

The Israeli-born musician returns to Penn State for the first time in more than fourteen years to perform a recital with pianist Rohan De Silva at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 1, in Eisenhower Auditorium. The concert, which had been scheduled for September 27, 2007, had to be rescheduled due to Perlman’s illness.

The scheduled program includes J. S. Bach’s Sonata No. 3 in E Major for Violin and Keyboard, BWV 1016; R. Strauss’ Sonata for Violin and Piano in E-flat Major, Op. 18; Poulenc’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, FP 119; and other works to be announced from the stage.

De Silva, a native of Sri Lanka and like Perlman a faculty member at The Juilliard School in New York City, frequently performs with Perlman. He has also played with other violin virtuosos, including Joshua Bell, Midori, Gil Shaham, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, and Pinchas Zukerman.

“When you perform with a pianist it’s a collaborative experience. [In] the pieces that you play there’s no such thing, as far as I’m concerned, as accompanying,” Perlman says. “Everything, for me, has the flavor of chamber music.”

Perlman insists that learning to play with others is the foundation upon which all musicianship is built.

“When it comes to being a performing artist, whether you are a chamber music player, whether you are a soloist, or whether you play in an orchestra, chamber music is the most important element in your musical education and your background,” says Perlman, speaking by phone from Lenox, Massachusetts.

“Chamber music basically has everything that you need to be a good musician,” he says. “Specifically, you have to listen to other people playing. You have to see what they’re doing. You have to breathe together, while you’re doing that.…You have to actually listen always to what goes on around you. So if you play solo with an orchestra, that’s what you have to do. If you play in an orchestra, that’s what you have to do. When you play chamber music, you look at each other. You know, you get signs.…So it’s all very, very connected.”

When the violinist and the pianist sit down to make music together as chamber musicians, Perlman asserts, they will have the best classical repertoire to interpret.

“Great composers,” Perlman says, “we’re talking about Mozart, and Haydn, and Schumann, and Schubert, and Brahms, and Mendelssohn, and Beethoven, I would say that probably their most successful and their greatest works that they wrote [were] for chamber music groups.”

The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts recognized Perlman in 2003 with a Kennedy Center Honor celebrating the violinist’s contributions to the cultural and educational vitality of America. President Clinton awarded Perlman the National Medal of Arts in 2000, while President Reagan bestowed upon him the Medal of Liberty in 1986.

One of Perlman’s finest hours came in his performance of the John Williams-composed violin solos for Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning film Schindler’s List. He was also the violin soloist for Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha, another film for which Williams composed the score.

The violinist has earned fifteen Grammy Awards, the most recent for The American Album with Conductor Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony.

Perlman, who first visited the United States at age 13 to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1958, enjoys a superstar status not often associated with a classical musician. Part of that can be explained by his remarkable musicianship and the joy with which he plays with leading orchestras, in recitals, and at major festivals. His fame and visibility are also due to his comfort with the media. Perlman has long been a fixture on television, making appearances on programs as varied as Sesame Street, The Late Show with David Letterman, and Live from Lincoln Center.

The violinist earned the most recent of his four Emmy Awards for Fiddling for the Future, a PBS documentary about the Perlman Music Program based in Shelter Island, New York. Founded in 1995 by Perlman and his wife Toby, the program includes a six-week summer session for musicians ages 12 to 18. There, the youngsters play individually, in chamber ensembles, and as part of an orchestra. They also sing in a chorus each day. A shorter summer session, which lasts two-and-a-half weeks, focuses exclusively on chamber music and is for musicians 18 and older. Perlman teaches throughout the summer.

“It gives me much more variety in my musical life,” he says. “I’ve been teaching for years. It’s just that it has become more intense in the last 13, 14 years.”

Early on in the program, Perlman says, his wife asked him to coach an ensemble. He knew, in that context, that “coach” meant “conduct,” something he had not seriously contemplated.

“I did not feel that I had any pressure because it was under the heading of teaching,” he recalls. “So I tried to do that, and I got some very, very good results. And that’s how I started to think more seriously about trying to conduct professional orchestras. And the rest is a very, very happy experience.”

Perlman made his professional conducting debut in 1997, and has since guided ensembles on several continents, including the New York, Los Angeles, London, Berlin, and Israel philharmonics; The Philadelphia Orchestra; and the symphony orchestras of Chicago, Pittsburgh, Boston, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, Seattle, Montreal, Toronto, St. Louis, and Atlanta. He has also conducted his daughter Navah, a talented pianist.

Conducting and teaching have enriched his life.

“When you teach others, you cannot avoid but teach yourself. And so as a result what happens is that everything is intertwined,” he says. “And so the conducting helps the playing. The playing helps the conducting. The teaching helps everything.”

“I find that those extra activities are…a real blessing,” he says. “It makes my musical experiences much more interesting and much more complete. So, I’m very happy about that.”

Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring violinist James Lyon, professor of music at Penn State, is offered in Eisenhower Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders. Artistic Viewpoints regularly fills to capacity. Seating is available on a first-arrival basis.